Against the grain: PBS infomercials; flaking or public service?

My contrarian impulse is having a something of a knee-jerk reaction over a plate of pasta and my homemade spaghetti sauce after recently watching some of Dr. Mark Hyman, director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and Dr. William Davis, a Milwaukee-based American cardiologist, sounding ominous warnings about sugar, including sugar-laded soft drinks, bread, breakfast cereals, pastries, pasta and other carbohydrates in separate alternate medicine infomercial-like fundraisers on Detroit Public TV, WTVS Channel 56, which my cable provider thoughtfully includes in its basic package up here in nearby Thompson, Manitoba. Sugar, of course, is de rigueur the bad boy of food staples these days, and is to the 2010s what eggs were to the 1980s (eggs, thankfully have been rehabilitated reputationally and are no longer a cholesterol cautionary tale for medical practitioners and nutritionists everywhere).

Whatever-happened to the good old days on American Public Television when a typical Saturday evening included what seemed like at least four-hour telethon pledge fundraisers, interspersed with occasional obscure Moody Blues concert footage featuring Nights in White Satin and Tuesday Afternoon for those of us in a certain age demographic? We got five years older, I suppose, is what happened and we spend more time before bedtime these Saturday nights thinking about being circa 60 then the Sixties. Public television programmers at PBS seem to be betting that we’re ready to hear less symphonic rock and a bit more about our glycemic index, belly fat, joint inflammation – inflammation seemingly everywhere actually – soaring blood sugars, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and our long-abused and vastly overworked pancreas and liver.

To his credit, Dr. Hyman now likes butter and eggs. He’s the author of Eat Fat and Get Thin, The Blood Sugar Solution and The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body’s Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast.

Dr. Davis is the author of Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health and Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox. In fairness to the good doctors, since I only watched about 45 minutes or so of both their shows (and Davis was actually on late-night mid-week, not on a Saturday night), so I didn’t hear their entire arguments. But I seemed to hear a lot more from both in terms of specifics about what was bad for you then what was good for you, which was deal with in generalities. I suppose it’s a bit hard to hawk you latest book if you give the good stuff all away on TV. Still, while I know Dr. Hyman has traded in his bagels for eggs, and gives a thumbs-up to fat (of some kinds, presumably found in specific foods beside eggs and butter, which he also likes) I’m at a loss to what Dr. Davis likes to eat, although if had tuned in longer, I might have found out.

I confess when I got to that area of the program, I was hearing the audio only as I was multi-tasking, putting away my freshly-laundered clothes in another room, listening to the TV in another, but I think I heard him talking about withdrawal symptoms coming off bread and pasta, produced by opioid peptides when some grains are digested, in the same language addictions experts talk about the relative merits of tapering versus cold turkey off narcotics like heroin. It didn’t really entice me much to give up Jeanette’s homemade Red River bread, fresh and warm out of the oven.

Now, CBC’s the fifth estate, just over a year ago, dug into Dr. Davis’ anti-wheat claims, and said some of them were hard to digest, as they were based on shaky science. A Feb. 27, 2015 online version of the investigation, “Wheat Belly arguments are based on shaky science, critics say: Scientists dispute claims in best-selling book, fifth estate finds” can be read here at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/wheat-belly-arguments-are-based-on-shaky-science-critics-say-1.2974214

Its’ fine journalism, as we’ve long come to expect from the fifth estate, with some good old debunking by Canadian scientists, including “Joe Schwarcz, a chemist at McGill University dedicated to demystifying science and debunking big claims” but it perhaps takes itself a bit too seriously.

Methinks this is rather the wrong approach: “The Battle of the Experts,” as it were.

Because to be clear, both Dr. Hyman and Dr. Davis, appear to be well qualified as medical practitioners with substantive knowledge in this area of ever-evolving medicine. They’re not quacks or scientific frauds. But they are charismatic and zealous marketers who are onto a good thing in terms of books sales, but I have no doubt they believe in what they are saying and that belief does have some foundation in promoting public health, not just sales of their books. Mind you, they believed the exact opposite in the 1980s and ate and promoted grain and carbohydrate-based diets. But, hey, didn’t we all think that was what was good for us back then? I still recall being a bit than less than overly excited about oat bran in everything, but whatever works, right?

Let’s face it; if you don’t think we have epidemic-like numbers in terms of caseloads of type 2 diabetes and obesity, just for starters, here in Northern Manitoba and across much of Canada and America, indeed whole swaths of the developed world (but not everywhere) you haven’t been paying attention to reality and the anecdotal evidence of your own eyes since at least the 1980s. While we can argue about the causes or triggers of these public health scourges, and just maybe grains and carbohydrates aren’t joint Public Food Enemy Number 1, but instead medicine’s flavour-of-the-month, you’d still have to have your head in the muskeg of the ever melting permafrost up here to say insulin resistance should be ignored and it’s OK to gratuitously continue to insult our pancreas and liver, without as much as second thought. I’d like to think there is something to be said for a very old cardinal virtue known as temperance and sometimes called moderation also. Not that I by any means practice what I preach in all areas of health or anything else when it comes to it. I’m not claiming personal perfection, simply my turn at the soapbox here.

As for PBS, I remain a big fan of public television, including Detroit PBS.

True, there was a time not so long ago, of course, when alternative medicine or medical views – anything pretty much that derivated from mainstream allopathic, often ultra-pharmacologically friendly medicine, were considered heretical views and had a very tough time getting airtime or ink if you were more homeopathic or naturopathic in what you were proposing. I am not naïve enough to think Big Pharma has packed their doctor’s bag and stopped making house calls. Of course they haven’t. But Detroit PBS, seemed by inference with Dr. Hyman and Dr. Davis, to be implying they were a free speech platform of last resort, providing a noble public service.

Sorry, public television broadcasting folks. This was closer along the continuum , at least in my view, to flaking for an infomercial.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

[BJ1]

 

The friendship of Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and St. Louis Jesuit priest Father Ed Dowling, who helped to convert American Newspaper Guild founder and union activist Heywood Broun to Catholicism

Bill Wilson, left, and Father Ed Dowling, right

Dr. Bob Smith, left, and Heywood Broun, right

The entire 12-step movement, which now totals more than 100 self-help fellowships, can be traced back to two men originally from Vermont, Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician.

The birth of Alcoholics Anonymous is dated from their meeting and Smith’s last bottle of beer on June 10, 1935. They would be affectionately known ever after as Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the co-founders of AA.

Wilson had been influenced by Ebby Thacher – or Ebby T. in the preferred anonymous parlance of 12-step programs – a friend from boarding school, who paid Wilson a visit in November 1934, while Thacher was a member of the Oxford Group, popular on college campuses in the 1920s, and founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister.

The first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, known almost universally by its informal title as simply the Big Book, was published on April 10, 1939. There were 4,730 books printed, with red cloth binding, wide columns, thick paper (which was why it was called the Big Book in the first place), and a red, yellow, black and white dust jacket, which came to be known as the “circus cover.”

Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA as it is also known, has long had an impact on the larger culture and its perhaps most famous slogan, “one day at a time,” long ago entered the public vocabulary as a sentiment to remind people feeling overwhelmed by events to pause for a moment, step back and see their lives in the present moment, not the past or future, which  has made the concept of the current 24 hours – and in a crisis sometimes even smaller units of time – a cornerstone of AA.

Wilson’s spiritual advisor and “sponsor”  for almost 20 years from November 1940 until his death in April 1960 was a Jesuit priest, Father Ed Dowling, from St. Louis.

Dowling was born in St. Louis on Sept. 1, 1898. He attended the Baden Public and the Holy Name Parochial School and went on to St. Louis University High School. In 1918, he served as a private in the First World War. In 1919, he began working as a reporter on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Later that same year, Dowling entered the Order at Florissant and followed the regular course subsequently for philosophy at St. Louis University.

Dowling was a member of the American Newspaper Guild and served as a delegate for the St. Louis local at Guild conventions in Toronto and San Francisco. He was a friend of Heywood Broun, the noted New York columnist, Guild founder and legendary union activist, and helped, along with then Father Fulton J. Sheen, to convert Broun from agnosticism to Catholicism seven months before his death in 1939.

When he decided to become a priest, Dowling reportedly told his newspaper colleagues he was entering the seminary –  the very next morning –  at an all-night cafe frequented by Globe-Democrat reporters.

Dowling’s regency from 1926 to 1929 was spent at Loyola Academy in Chicago. He was ordained in 1931 by Archbishop John Joseph Glennon of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, who was elevated to be a cardinal shortly before his death in 1946.

On a cold and rainy November night in 1940, Dowling showed up at 10 p.m. unannounced at Bill Wilson’s apartment above AA’s Twenty-Fourth Street Club in New York City.

“I’m Father Ed Dowling from St. Louis,” he said. “A Jesuit friend and I have been struck by the similarity of the AA twelve steps and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.”

Dowling would become the first American Catholic clergyman to prominently endorse AA, both in later revised editions of the Big Book, and in 1947 in The Queen’s Work, a magazine published by the Central Office of Sodalities of Our Lady.

When Dowling, as one of the originators, helped start Couples Are Not Alone (CANA), a national Catholic movement for married couples in 1942,  he borrowed heavily, he told Wilson, from AA’s 12 steps to help participants deal with mental difficulties, scruples and sexual compulsions.

As a guest speaker at AA’s St. Louis International Convention in Kiel Auditorium in 1955,  Dowling remarked: “There is a negative approach from agnosticism. This was the approach of Peter the Apostle. ‘Lord, to whom shall we go’?” I doubt if there is anybody in this hall who really ever sought sobriety. I think we were trying to get away from drunkenness. I don’t think we should despise the negative. I have a feeling that if I ever find myself in heaven, it will be from backing away from hell.”

Dowling died peacefully in his sleep in Memphis on April 3, 1960.

It has has been customary across Canada during the third week in November since 1981, which begins Sunday, Nov. 16 this year, to mark National Addictions Awareness Week and all its variants such as National Aboriginal Addictions Awareness Week and Manitoba Addictions Awareness Week (MAAW).

The federal government in 1987 first proclaimed the week. Approximately 600,000 people take part in NAAW activities throughout the country.

Much of the early work was conceptualized and developed in St. Albert, Alberta at the Nechi Training, Research & Health Promotions Institute, which is housed with Poundmaker’s Lodge, known as Canada’s first addictions treatment centre specifically for aboriginal clients.

Damian Thompson, associate editor at The Spectator in London, specializing in religion and classical music, published a book in May 2012 called, The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading our Lives and Taking Over Your World, in which he argues addictions to iPhones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and Internet pornography – to name just a few – are taking over our lives. Our most casual daily habits can quickly become obsessions that move beyond our control, Thompson argued, suggesting that human desire is in the process of being reshaped.

“Already, the distinction between ‘addicts’ and ordinary people is far less clear than it was even 20 years ago, Thompson wrote in a May 28, 2012 piece for the Daily Telegraph in London, where he was editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist at the time, headlined, “Addiction: the coming epidemic,” with the “line between consumption, habit and addiction is becoming dangerously blurred The difference between old-fashioned porn and Internet porn is a bit like the difference between wine and spirits. After hundreds of years as a mild intoxicant, erotica has undergone a sudden distillation. Digital porn is the equivalent of cheap gin in Georgian England: a reliable if unhygienic hit that relieves misery and boredom. And, unlike the old ‘dirty mags,’ it is available in limitless quantities.”

Whether addiction is a disease, in the true medical sense of the word (Thompson argued it is not), a cognitive behavioural problem, or self-destructive habits borne out of poor choices, but choices nonetheless, is an ongoing debate, and while interesting, is of secondary importance. Whatever addiction is or isn’t, few would argue that it doesn’t affect entire families – and even communities – across all generational, ethnic, racial and class distinctions.

Addiction, be it to alcohol or other drugs, gambling, Internet pornography, etc., is an equal opportunity destroyer of lives. While the addict or the alcoholic may be the most obvious casualty, the collateral damage is all around them.

While it’s impossible to overstate the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12-step programs on addictions treatment and recovery, it’s not the only model in a reality where relapse is the norm.

Two steps forward, one step backwards and perhaps a step sideways is the reality of addiction.

Bill Wilson himself  was a surprisingly freethinker on a lot of this, refusing often to get bogged down in the semantics. AA worked for him, so he worked his program with a live-and-let live attitude.